The top 10 fastest Supercomputers in the world

With the release of the most recent Top500 supercomputer list, China still holds the lead in terms total number of systems, at 202. While retaining second place overall, the United States is at its lowest level in years, with 143 systems. Japan (35) and Germany (20) are third and fourth.

Below is a list of the top systems.

10. K computer

Used for meteorology, disaster prevention, and medicine, this system is Japanese engineered and makes the list running at a top speed of 10.5 petaflops, with a total core of 705,024.

9. Oakforest-PACS

Japan uses this at the University of Tokyo and the University of Tsukuba jointly and it has top speeds of 13.6 petaflops and a core of 556,104. It is manufactured by Fujitsu.

8. Cori

This system was named after Gerty Cori, American biochemist and the first woman to win a Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine. The Berkeley Lab’s National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) houses this machine, and it has a top speed of 14 petaflops, with a total core of 622,336.

7. Trinity

At the Las Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, the Trinity is a Cray system and runs at 14.1 petaflops, and its total core is 979,968.

6. Sequoia

This system was the world’s fastest supercomputer in 2012, but is now at number 6. It is manufactured by IBM and used for nuclear weapons simulations. It has a top speed of 17.1 petaflops and total core of 1,572,864.

5. Titan

The Titan is at the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF), and is used to improve nuclear power plant safety and performance, boosted drug development, and improved understanding of climate change. It has a top speed of 17.6 petaflops, and a total core of 560,640.

4. Gyoukou

This system is housed at Japan’s Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology, capable of 19.1 petaflops using PEZY-SC2 accelerators and Intel Xeon processors, with a total core of 19,860.000.

3. Piz Daint

As Europe’s fastest supercomputer, the Piz Daint was named after a mountain near its Swiss home. It has been recently upgraded with NVIDIA P100 Tesla GPUs, and its current speed is now more than double, from a previous 9.8 to 19.6 petaflops, with a total core of 361,760.

2. Tianhe-2

This system is also known as the Milky Way 2 and was the previous record holder for three years, prior to the Sunway TaihuLight. It was built by China’s National University for Defense Technology. Its top speed is 33.8 petaflops.

1. Sunway TaihuLight

This system is capable of performing 93,000 trillion calculations per second, and is at the National Supercomputing Center in Wuxi, China. It is by far the world’s most powerful computer, with a 93 petaflop top speed, and a core of 10,649,600.